Now i’ve clearly missed the boat on bitcoin mining and it seems that unless you have a datacentre crammed full of racks with hardware you can’t make any decent return on it. An ex colleague of mine did ‘well’l on it at one point but not sure if he’s still running it these days. That said it’s something i’ve always been interested in and with a pi sitting idle I thought I would give it a go.

Download the Minepeon pi image file from their site i’ve also hosted it here MinePeon-0.2.4.6-RaspberryPi.img.zip sha256sum 3b85225252795e53e22f23b07bf54a3423db73112e78f022023b55ec825fe82c as per https://downloads.mineforeman.com/minepeon/sha256sum.txt

Extract the image file

Insert SD card into your reader

Run Win32 disk imager

Select your sd card device on the right i.e [H\] WARNING make sure you choose the correct drive letter or you may end up erasing the wrong drive!

Click the folder icon and browse to the image file you extracted earlier.

Check the destination drive letter is right!

Check the destination drive letter is right!

Click ‘Write’

Once the image has been written stick it in your pi

Connect pi to a monitor and ethernet port on your router

Switch on the pi, the boot screen will load and it will try and obtain an ip via dhcp, it boots really quickly so i missed the ip it got so I did an nmap to find it.

Put the ip into your browser and you will probably get a security warning (just accept it).

Update allows you to update Hashra, when I clicked on it it stated “A newer version is available, do you want to Update?” but I have decided not to do this for now.

Back on the dashboard I ntoced that it said “Running in SCRYPT mode” obviously if your only wanting to mine Litecoin for example you can leave it set to this. Below are some mining stats/hash rate etc.

The final selectable options are Scrypt SHA256 and Dual which you’ll need to set depending on what you want to mine, after choosing you will need to ‘Save and restart’.

While researching bitcoin mining hardware and was considering purchasing the Antminer U3 as I liked it’s apparent ease of setup and higher hash rate then a usb asic I stumbled upon the Gridseed 5 Chip Dual ASIC Miner GC3355. The Gridssed had similar form factor but the added bonus that it is a dual miner and can do either SHA-256 (Bitcoin) OR Scrypt (i.e litecoin) and even both simultaneously.

Specifications

Dimensions

9.5cm x 7cm

Weight

418 grams

Power input

12v DC input

Cooling

Large heatsink and fan ensure it runs cool

Hashing Speed

Mode

SHA256 (Bitcoin)

Scrypt (Litecoin/Dogecoin)

Power Consumtion (watts)

Dual Mode

8 gh/s

300 kh/s

60 watts

Scrypt Only Mode

OFF

330 kh/s

7 watts

Software

As it was always the intention to use my spare Pi B as the controller I spent some time looking for suitable compatible software. One thing I wanted specifically was a web based control panel so I could setup monitoring on a seperate screen and for the ease of learning what all the differnet numbers mean.
I cam across this useful blog post on cryptomining-blog I narrowed my choice down to Scripta and Hashra. On the post they gave the highest props to Scripta however a downside is that it supports SHA-256 (Botcoin) mining only. While this is new to me I didn’t want to limit myself to just Bitcoin so the obvious choice was Hashra as it supports scrypt only (bfgminer), SHA-256 (cgminer) only or dual-mining mode (cpuminer + cgminer).

After managing to win one on ebay I obviously decided to drop my previous BTC/Minepoen project.

Hashra, they have different images on their site to use depending on your hardware choice. As I will be using the Gridseed 5 Mini I downloaded the following image HASHRA MINI CONTROLA FIRMWARE DOWNLOAD I have also hosted it on theoutpost as an alternative location. sha256sum 7FC32B10DD6CC9B1046954159E9808DB356112A7D686C9597178873F546D1A0E

Extract the image file

Insert SD card into your reader

Run Win32 disk imager

Select your sd card device on the right i.e [H\] WARNING make sure you choose the correct drive letter or you may end up erasing the wrong drive!

Click the folder icon and browse to the image file you extracted earlier.

Check the destination drive letter is right!

Check the destination drive letter is right!

Click ‘Write’

Once the image has been written stick it in your pi

Connect pi to a monitor and ethernet port on your router

Switch on the pi, the boot screen will load and it will try and obtain an ip via dhcp, once it’s finished booting just before the login prompt it should display it’s ip address.

Put the ip into your browser i.e http://192.168.1.211/ and you should get the login page

Update allows you to update Hashra, when I clicked on it it stated “A newer version is available, do you want to Update?” but I have decided not to do this for now.

Back on the dashboard I ntoced that it said “Running in SCRYPT mode” obviously if your only wanting to mine Litecoin for example you can leave it set to this. Below are some mining stats/hash rate etc.

On the right are boxes for you to set your mining pools and adjust the clock rate of your miners.

The final selectable options are Scrypt SHA256 and Dual which you’ll need to set depending on what you want to mine, after choosing you will need to ‘Save and restart’.
After this I logged into the pi via ssh using

User: pi

Password: 3K4Hb8FMeZjQZJEX6scYzZa

I was happy to find that it was running Raspbian GNU/Linux 7 \n \l with apt-get etc installed as well as sudo.

As I’m due to tow horses for this years show season I thought it would be a good idea to have a camera in the trailer and monitor in the car so I can see how the horse is doing. I looked at off the shelf systems but they were all £100 plus and a lot weren’t wireless and required a constant power supply for the camera in the trailer. So it got me thinking that maybe I could knock something utilising my used pi zero’s. Project brief My idea is to use a pi zero enclosed in a monitor case and connected to it via it’s ‘TV’ pads and all powered via 5v. The camera end will again be a pi zero in some sort of enclosure running off a usb battery bank.

I use my Pi B in my car to do timelapse photos powered off a cigarette to usb plug however I found that sometimes the plug would fall out and thus power down the pi. I also had the problem that even if I wanted to stop for 5 minutes which meant turning the engine off again the pi would be powered down. TO overcome this I thought I would look into using a usb power bank as a mini ups and here are the results of my testing.

I tested for both pass-through charging i.e. a power bank which allows to be charged while powering a device AND ‘UPS’ which is a usb bank which supports pass-through charging with the added feature of power to the connected device (pi) being uninteruppted when the mains charger was switched off/on.

Digital color TFT LCD car rearview monitor,4.3 inch TFT LCD Screen Size, 480 x 272 Resolution,16 : 9 Display Format
It is with high quality and good durability,With small appearance,convenient for carry,Support 2-channel video input(V1, V2).
It Support multi-role display,With high definition for good image,With a stand holder which has adhesive sticker in the bottom for sticking it in the car.
It Support automatically startup detection when reserving,It can connect with reversing camera, DVD, VCD etc.
It is installed in the drive foreground,Video system: NTSC / PAL auto switchable,Display black screen on no signal,Visible area: 72 x 53 mm.

Ok so at 480 x 272 not mega resolution but perfectly useable to my console command line based application.

Contents of the box was the monitor with hard wired phono audio and video cables and a socket based power connector with inline fuse. Also was a sperate jack plug with bare red and black wires for connecting to your power source.

I thought I would power it up just to make sure it worked before taking it apart, plugged into my home made bench psu and nothing?

I put my multimeter on it to make sure the psu was working properly and it was?

I then plugged in my Pi and the screen sprung into life.

It seems a 1p bulb is too much to ask for on a £12 monitor.

**** WARNING MAKING THE FOLLOWING CHANGES WILL OBVIOUSLY INVALIDATE ANY WARRANTY ETC, CONTINUE AT YOUR OWN RISK, I ACCEPT NO RESPONSIBILITY IF ANY OF YOUR EQUIPMENT BREAKS/CATCHES FIRE ETC ****

Removing the four small screws on the rear and opening the case revealed a simple circuit board.

After some digging around with the multimeter I found a 5v supply on the CHMC 8AY 1508-AD chip.

I removed the red feed wire from it’s currently location onto the 5v leg of the chip and added some electrical tape for strain relief.

Now time for the test (fingers crossed)

Great it powered up fine.

Wanting to run off a usb cigarette adapter in the car I added a USB connector to the bare red/black wires of the jack plug,

This tip is useful if you have scripts running that copy files to specific locations and you want the mounts to remain static. Although this is aimed at the raspberry pi it will also work on Debian etc you’ll just need to change the UID, GID etc.

I use ntfs drives so I can use them both on linux and windows so the first step was to install ntfs-3gsudo apt-get install ntfs-3g

Insert the usb drive into a free port and run the following command to find out it’s UUIDls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid/

To make this persistant we update fstab but before doing so it’s a good idea to make a backupsudo cp /etc/fstab /etc/fstab.backupsudo nano /etc/fstab

Add the following to fstab (replace UUID UID GID and mount point with yours)UUID=DE64414D64412A1B /mnt/usbflash ntfs-3g uid=1000,gid=1000,umask=007 0 0

Before mine looked like thisproc /proc proc defaults 0 0/dev/mmcblk0p1 /boot vfat defaults 0 2/dev/mmcblk0p2 / ext4 defaults,noatime 0 1# a swapfile is not a swap partition, so no using swapon|off from here on, use dphys-swapfile swap[on|off] for that

This quick guide will walk you through installing the lighttpd webserver on a raspberry Pi.

Update packagessudo apt-get update

Install lighttpdsudo apt-get install lighttpd

Once completed enter your pi’s ip address in a browser and if all has gone well your should see the holding page.

Now we will adjust some permissions to ensure the “Pi” user account can write files to the location where Lighttpd expects to find web pages. The /var/www directory is currently owned by the “root” user. So let’s make the “www-data” user and group the owner of the /var/www directory.sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www

Allow the “www-data” group permission to write to /var/wwwsudo chmod 775 /var/www

I had the need to upload files to the cloud to share with family members and rather than using web servers/ftp I thought i’d try something different and try uploading to my google drive, after a quick search I found the grive application and this is my howto for intsatalling it. This application syncs data between your pi and google drive so when exectued any newly created directories and files on either will be refelcted on the other.

Next create a directory where you want to keep your google drive files ie /home/user/googledrive and copy the grive executable to it.

root@devpi:/usr/bin/grive/ cp grive /home/user/googledrive

NOTE: RUNNING THIS APPLICATION WILL SYNC DATA BETWEEN GOOGLE DRIVE AND YOUR PI, CHECK YOUR USAGE ON GOOGLE DRIVE TO ENSURE YOU HAVE ENOUGH STORAGE ON YOUR PI

The first time your run grive you need to do it with the -a option

cd /home/user/googledrive

./grive -a

A link will be printed in the terminal window. Copy the link and paste it in a browser. A page on google will appear asking you confirm permissions for the app.
After clicking accept you will be taken to another google page which has a bog with a code in it
copy and paste this into your terminal

That’s it your first sync is done, your googledrive directory on your pi should now reflect whats stored on your remote google drive. Adding files to either the pi or cloud will be reflected the next time grive is exectuted using the command grive from your created folder ie

cd /home/user/googledrive

grive

Now you can create scripts/cron jobs to automatically sync your files.